Marie Howe | |
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| Born | (1950-10-18)October 18, 1950 (age 75) Rochester, New York, U.S. |
| Occupation | Poet, Professor |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | University of Windsor(B.A.) Columbia University(M.F.A) |
| Genre | Poetry |
| Notable works |
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| Notable awards |
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| Children | Grace Inan Howe |
| Poet Laureate of New York | |
| In office 2012–2014 | |
| Preceded by | Jean Valentine |
| Succeeded by | Yusef Komunyakaa |
| Website | |
| www | |
Marie Howe (born 1950) is an American poet. Howe served asNew York Poet Laureate from 2012–2016. She is currently a Chancellor of theAcademy of American Poets and Poet-in-Residence atThe Cathedral of St John the Divine. Throughout her career, she has received fellowships from theJohn Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, theNational Endowment for the Arts, theHarvard Radcliffe Institute, andThe Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.[1]
In 1987 her debut collectionThe Good Thief was selected byMargaret Atwood for theNational Poetry Series.[2] Her subsequent collections includeWhat the Living Do (1997),The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (2008), andMagdalene (2017), which was Longlisted for theNational Book Award for Poetry.[3] In 2024W. W. Norton & Company published herNew & Selected Poems,[4] whileBloodaxe Books published its UK companion,What the Earth Seemed to Say, to critical acclaim.[5]
Howe was born inRochester, New York. In a 2013 interview withOn Being, Howe would note that
I grew up in theCatholic religion, in a largeIrish-Catholic family. I was the oldest daughter out of nine children. All of my sisters had nine or ten kids, and all of my father’s sisters and brothers also had nine or ten kids, so I had literally over a hundred first cousins. It was a tribal childhood, and the Catholicism was at the center of it.[6]
In the 1960’s Howe enrolled in theAcademy of the Sacred Heart, a socially progressive,parochial all-girls school, where the nuns centered what Theology has to do with “social justice, service, questioning, and authority.”[6] Howe would later observe that “it was there that I began to appreciate that spirituality could be rigors, imaginative and an essential part of living in the physical world.”[6] During this time she would spend “hours lying in the bathtub” reading fromThe Lives of Saints, which would become her first example of “women who were the subjects of their own lives, not objects.”[6]
Howe would later attend theUniversity of Windsor, a historically Roman Catholic university inOntario, Canada, where she earned a BA in English. She would subsequently relocate toGroton, Massachusetts, to pursue a career as a journalist, and later a high school English teacher. In 1980 she received a fellowship to the Summer Humanities Institute atDartmouth College, where she had applied to study Philosophy, but ended up enrolling in a creative writing workshop.[7]
In 1981 Howe relocated toConcord, Massachusetts. When reflecting on this time later in life, Howe would note that
Every day I would walk to the old North Bridge and visitThoreau’s Grave andEmerson’s grave. I was so lonely, lonely, lonely. And I learned how to sit still. And how to sit in a chair and bang on a typewriter. You know. You have to learn how to sit still. I didn’t know how to do that. It took me a long time. I applied to graduate schools and I went. It was a miracle.[7]
The following year she moved toNew York City to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing atColumbia University School of the Arts.
She worked briefly as a newspaper reporter in Rochester and as a high school English teacher in Massachusetts. Howe did not devote serious attention to writing poetry until she turned 30. At the suggestion of an instructor in a writers' workshop, Howe applied to and was accepted atColumbia University where she studied withStanley Kunitz and received her M.F.A. in 1983.[8][9]
She has taught writing atTufts University andWarren Wilson College. She is presently on the writing faculties atColumbia University,Sarah Lawrence College, andNew York University.[10][11]
Her first book,The Good Thief, was selected byMargaret Atwood as the winner of the 1987 Open Competition of theNational Poetry Series.[12] In 1998, she published her best-known book of poems,What the Living Do; the title poem in the collection is a haunting lament for her brother with the plain-spoken last line: "I am living, I remember you."
Howe's brother John died of an AIDS-related illness in 1989. "John’s living and dying changed my aesthetic entirely," she has said.[13] In 1995, Howe co-edited, with Michael Klein, a collection of essays, letters, and stories entitledIn the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic.
Her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines includingThe New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, andHarvard Review.[14] Her honors include National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships.[15][16]
In January 2018, Howe was elected a Chancellor of theAcademy of American Poets.[17]
Marie Howe is praised for her poetry which captures the metaphysical and spiritual dimensions of everyday life .[18] Her work explores the nature of the soul and the self through literary themes of life, death, love, pain, hope, despair, sin, virtue, solitude, community, impermanence, and the eternal.[19] Despite the strong themes in her writing, Howe subtly expresses these messages through the explanation of daily tasks and regular lifestyles in most of her poems.
Her first collection,The Good Thief (1988), was made philosophical and reflective with the incorporation of Biblical and mythical allusions. Margaret Atwood, who chose this book for the National Poetry Series, praised Howe’s “poems of obsession that transcend their own dark roots.”[18] Additionally, Stanley Kunitz noted, “Her long, deep-breathing lines address the mysteries of flesh and spirit, in terms accessible only to a woman who is very much of our time and yet still in touch with the sacred.” Such an esteemed review justified the selection ofThe Good Thief for the Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the American Academy of Poets.[20]
A year after the publication of her first poetry book (1989), Howe’s brother John died fromAIDS. According to Howe in anAGNI interview, “John’s living and dying changed my aesthetic completely.”[18] Consequently in 1997, she published a second collection,What the Living Do, as an elegy for John which reflected a new style. Stripped of metaphors, her writing was described as “a transparent, accessible documentary of loss” by thePoetry Foundation.[18][19]
In 2008, Howe distanced herself from the personal narrative and returned to the spiritual style inThe Kingdom of Ordinary Time.[18] This is most representative of Howe’s style now, a balance between the ordinary and unordinary. It is best put by playwright Eve Ensler, who describes her poems as “a guide to living on the brink of the mystical and the mundane.”[19]
Poetry Collections
Anthologies
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)| International | |
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| 1922–1950 |
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| 1951–1975 |
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| 1976–2000 |
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| 2001–2025 |
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